Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Are Human Ideas And Opinions Quantum Objects?

Are human ideas and opinions quantum objects? Does it show properties of superposition? Does it have a wavefunction and observable operators? Really!

In the continuing effort to "bastardize" quantum mechanics, many people who don't have a clue of what it is routinely cite the various aspects of quantum mechanics and then applying it to situations where it may not even apply. Crackpots do this all the time, especially in areas of pseudoscience where QM has been used as a justification for all the new-age mumbo jumbo. They do this while forgetting that various aspects of QM have been experimentally tested and verified, whereas their applications to other things have not.

And that brings us to this "delightful" discussion. The writer applied both QM and SR (the physics-bastardization double-coupon) to make amazing justification regarding opposite opinions.

So what's physics got to do with it? First, it allows two contradictory descriptions of nature to be true. So both my friends both could be (and were) right. As Neils Bohr put it: The opposite of a shallow truth is false, but the opposite of a deep truth is also true.

Particles are waves and waves are particles. Whether they show one face or the other depends on what you look for in your experiment, on what kind of question you ask. In other words, the context.

Each of my friends is a complex, warm, caring, passionate and much-loved individual. Each is also nothing but a bunch of quarks and electrons. Two contradictory statements. Both true. Different contexts.

This, of course, isn't new. Extreme post-modernists have done this already, with hysterical and nonsensical conclusions. One only needs to follow the situation surrounding the Sokal Hoax.

The problem in all of this is, of course, that if you understand only a very small and superficial portion of something, and then you apply it, you've essentially ignore the majority of what you applied. For example, if contradictory ideas like that can be represented or justified as "waves" or having such duality, then ALL the other consequences of such analogy should also follow. What happened when they "interfere" with each other, or underwent rapid decoherence? If one makes an "observation", shouldn't the other ideas essentially goes away since the wavefunction has collapsed? Now what?

Bastardization of physics produces nonsensical results. I don't know why people need to grasp onto something they don't even understand to justify something.